Familypedia:Info pages/Gedcom translation
For general Gedcom information, see GEDCOM. This topic covers Info pages as they relate to Gedcom. Gedcom5.5 is irrelevant as it is being phased out. Though 5.5 files exist now, the new structures represent the development challenge. Source doc: http://xml.coverpages.org/Gedcom-XMLv60.pdf Yep, dated Dec 2002. ::(edit) LDS backed away from GEDCOM 6.0, and they do not recommend any development work be based on it. Currently, there are several XML based initiatives- some events based, some evidence based. Familysearch XML is an interesting one, but for a full list see the end portion of wikipedia's GEDCOM article for links to current standards efforts. -[[User:Phlox|'~'' Phlox']] 16:09, 9 May 2009 (UTC) Gedcom 6.0 structure 2 1 2 adopted . . . . . . . . . We Attend the Kunzle Family Reunion 5 min, 15 sec into the video, to 10 min, 30 sec. Our family is featured about 5 minutes into the video. Record created Adopted child added . . . Duchess Neta Eskelson von Allen . . . . . . . . . F dead seamstress FROM 1835 TO 1875 FROM 10 JUL 1845 TO 25 MAY 1880 . . . 5 ft. 4 in. tall, blond hair, blue eyes, well mannered first ancestor . . . . . . p. 30 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . husband 26 wife 21 ABT 7 NOV 1834 Cove, Cache, Utah, USA 18.153N 178.150E . . . . . . Reformed Christian . . . . . . File No. 7895-09, p. 23 10 June 1903 Text extracted from the source. Certified copy in possession of Larry T. Smith, Sandy, Utah. . . .. . . . father mother child . . . Events *This is a big improvement for Gedcom 6.0. Issues *Performance: There is some concern about whether the wikimedia engine could handle the larger number of queries that usage of events might impose. For example, for birth date we simply grab the mother's birth with Template:get birth (which by the way is already complicated because it must assemble numeric month etc. plus place with links to wikipedia articles on them.) There is perhaps a dozen calls in there to the info objects for the son, then the mother- verifying existence of the key and so on, then translating and formatting the output. With events, this will involve greater indirection. Now I must go routing around in an event structure to find the pointer to the birth event. Only then can I start reading the data for birth month etc. Ok. So now the 12 calls is maybe 24. But now consider the coding complexity. *Will users ignore them? Already, folks have a wierd enough Info page. It may be a lot of bother for many folks to enter data as separate month day year values. Now you are going to ask them to go to a different (event) page to just enter a date? Wow. If we had forms, we could have an unhide button for a date and we could display the event info in situ. But that is not going to happen anytime this decade in the wikimedia engine, so we just have to be realistic if folks are going to use any of this stuff. Plan of record *Punt? We must ask, how will the event fields be used? Gedcom will be the dominant generator of these fields. When gedcom 6.0 files finally materialize, we can think about how we store this info so that we maintain data fidelity- we output gedcoms with no less data thean what we inputed. *Citations? Currently, Gedcom 5.5 and prior handle events as supporting evidence with citations. We could use the Cite feature (as opposed to ref) for encoding such gedcom data. The vision The cool thing about events is that they are more than their antecdent- in gedcom 5.5, supporting evidentiary material associated with a particular date- marriage record, baptism, diary account etc. In 6.0, you have this generalized notion of an event- the date, the geo coordinates, the participants. Here, the lines between genealogy and family history database become blurred. A genealogy database is a particular member of the set of family history database that is concerned solely with the generational structure. Well, maybe we are as interested in the individuals as we are of the statistics. There are collective events such as Building of the empire state building, Sinking of the Titanic, particular battles in wars, that make us in the words of Shakespeare, "bands of brothers" [[wikipedia:Henry V (play)|(Henry V)]], as much as parentage. Mock up See: Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-1997)/marriage Observations: *Kind of neat that you could have Synchronoptic views of genealogies in a family *Could have lots of events of time and place- Where schools, residences, occupation, basically- the chronology of the individual. *Some of these things- like high school- it is interesting for individuals to see genealogies of folks that were children of the same event. EG: as if the parent were the popular instructor, and all the classmates the children. *I wonder if genealogy of scientific advancements could be traced this way.... but this is blurring too much into hyperhistory. *As a practical matter, I just don't see a lot of interest in this level of granularity. **But if Gedcom bidirectionality is needed, then you have to at least preserve the data in some way. This sort of event info page seems to capture the field values ok. I just don't know that we need to get wonky about persuading folks to encode stuff this way. Why can't that sort of thing be an refinement of the database- OK so we just record marriage as a date and place. **Maybe move coordinates over to Person info. *Bot processed Timelines? maybe store the events on a single page as a div nested list. Forget about limitations imposed by processing with templates. Now you can use numeric IDs like the GUIDS, and can have long lists of participants without postpending a number or worrying about processing penalty on the server, and you don't have to worry about junking up the article namespace with whole new articles with sparse details for small events. (The above was written over a period ending 2007-11-19 by User:Phlox) GEDCOM 5.5 Those of us who produce "5.5" and have no plans to buy another program or an upgrade with the new systems will continue to produce "5.5" for some time. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:03, 10 May 2009 (UTC) Category: Info objects documentation Info pages